Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has long had a reputation for obliquity, and in approaching her work we will often find she withholds as much as she discloses. Ní Chuilleanáin’s frequent ekphrastic poems and recourse to metaphors of framing are also ways of rephrasing the central question of what a poem is, and how to approach lyric form afresh. Her focus on art works frequently transports the reader to a pre-Renaissance world, which Ní Chuilleanáin finds temperamentally conducive in her warm visions of Mediterranean Catholicism, and in the stress in her critical writings as well as her poetry on questions of embodiment and revealed truth. Music and architecture are frequent reference points, sometimes via the metaphysical poets, before Ní Chuilleanáin puts her distinctive and personal stamp on these themes. Hers is a complex art, but one whose façade of secrecy provides the necessary theatrical backdrop while Ní Chuilleanáin probes and reinvents received ideas of the woman poet in the Irish tradition.

Jane Hedley accounts for Plath’s descriptive and interpretive practice of poems that take art as their subject. Plath’s ekphrastic poems can be seen as interventions in a conversation with canonical predecessors from Keats to Auden, and can be traced not just to her deliberate study of art history, but to the studies she made as a visual artist, before she made the decision in young adulthood to concentrate on writing.